by Anita Shreve
“He asked after you.”
“Did he?”
“You know, I think he has a special fondness for you. There is something in the way he inquires about you that is always a little less than casual.”
Haskell withdraws his hand to shift the gears, and as he does so, she thinks about meeting Tucker and about her custody suit and about the terrible months afterward. The nights she roamed the house, crying for the boy. Haskell would hear her and come find her and then ease her back into bed. It was Haskell who finally, one day when she was away, dismantled the room, taking the children’s furniture back to the attic.
He pulls suddenly to the side of the road and makes a turn onto a narrow lane. She glances out the window and sees that they are in the marshes. He switches off the motor.
“John?” she asks, surprised that they have stopped.
For answer, he turns toward her and unfastens the top three buttons of her blouse. He tucks his fingers into her corset.
She laughs. “John?” she asks again.
“In a moment, we shall be at the house,” he says, “and will be surrounded by twenty-three girls and will not have a moment to ourselves. And then I shall have to go to the clinic, and when I come home, I shall probably be so exhausted that I will fall asleep immediately.”
“No, you will not. That is just an excuse.”
“Do I need an excuse?” he asks, massaging her breast.
“No, perhaps not,” she says.
“We were here once, in the marshes,” he says, unbuttoning her blouse further.
She can see and feel that day as vividly as she can the polished wood and leather of the interior of the car. The wet seeping along the length of her skirt. The whomp and flutter of a bird’s wing. The sun stuttering through the grasses. It was the first time she understood the nature of sexual passion.
His beard brushes against the skin of her chest, and she can smell the natural oil of his hair. They do not remove their coats. They might be young lovers, she thinks, with nowhere to go.
• • •
They park in the driveway and enter, as they always do, through the back door, Haskell carrying both of their satchels. Maria is on the telephone in the hallway, reading a grocery list into the mouthpiece.
“Six dozen eggs, four pounds of that cheese you sent us on Monday, seven chickens . . . Can you wait a minute?”
Maria puts her hand over the mouthpiece and turns toward Olympia. “I am just calling in the groceries to Goldthwaite’s,” she says. “You have a visitor.”
“I do?” Olympia asks, unwinding her muffler.
“A Mr. Philbrick.”
“How extraordinary,” she says.
“I shall just run up and change my shirt,” Haskell says, hanging his coat upon a hook, “and then I shall come in and say hello.” He checks his pocket watch. “But I am needed at the clinic. Ask Rufus to stay to dinner. I shall be back by then.”
Olympia watches her husband walk through the kitchen, snatching a biscuit from under a cloth on his way. She guesses he has not eaten since breakfast.
“Maria, did you give Mr. Philbrick tea?”
Maria, who came to them only seven months ago, has proven herself the ablest of all the girls and thus has been rewarded with the job of assistant to Lisette.
“Yes.”
“And where is Josiah?”
“In his office with the accounts.”
Olympia tucks a stray wisp of hair behind her ear. When she opens the swinging door, the cacophony of the house greets her like a rush of warm air. She likes to think of it as organized cacophony, though often it is not. She walks past the dining room, remodeled to hold two long refectory tables, and then past a sitting room in which Lisette is reading from a medical text. Around her, in a circle, are eight young women, some merely girls still, between the ages of fifteen and nineteen, some Franco, some Irish, some Yankee, all pregnant. All have been dismissed by their families. When it is their time, the girls will give birth upstairs and then will stay on for as long as they need to. When they have recuperated, they will contribute to the household by assuming various jobs — in the nursery or with the laundry or with the meals. The only rule is that they may not abandon their infants.
As Olympia makes her way toward the study, she remembers the night she first had the idea, sitting on the bed in the room with the blue forget-me-nots on the walls. In the months following the custody suit, Haskell helped her to bring the idea to life, even as he was starting up his own clinic in Ely Falls. Haskell and she moved into her mother’s old rooms, refurbished the other rooms to accommodate young mothers with newborns, and gradually, over a year’s time, took in girls whom Haskell either saw at the clinic or came to his attention. By the following year, girls and their families were begging for places, and still Haskell and Olympia continued to remodel. In the summer, when the weather turned fine, they were going to have the chapel converted into a dormitory.
But they have not had their own child. And they have been told they may not ever. Not long ago, in Boston, a specialist suggested to them that Olympia’s infertility was probably a result of her having had to give birth at such a tender age.
She turns the corner and finds Philbrick in the study, once her father’s, now her own. Still robust at sixty, Philbrick is dressed in a dark maroon jacket with plaid trousers. Ever the dandy, she thinks, eyeing as well the empty sandwich plate on the side table.
“Olympia,” he says, standing.
“Mr. Philbrick. Please sit.”
The room is considerably more feminine than it was when it was her father’s. Books still line one wall, but on the other, Olympia has put her pictures — the paintings and drawings by local artists she began collecting half a dozen years ago: a Childe Hassam, a Claude Legny, an Appleton Brown, an Ellen Robbins. A red and white silk settee has replaced her father’s old captain’s chair, but she still has his desk. And she has never replaced the objets — the malachite paperweight, the bejeweled cross, and the shells — that remind her of the days when her father would sit in his chair, reading one of the hundreds of books that were warping in the damp.
“It has been too long,” she says, sitting.
“You have an extraordinary household,” he says.
“It is the people within it who make it so,” she says.
“I have long wanted to see it. Of course, I have heard much about it. How many do you have here?”
“We have twenty-three girls. Eight of them have not yet given birth. The others will stay on as long as they need to. We have had several girls three years now.”
“A marvelous enterprise.”
“Our neighbors do not think so.”
He smiles. “No, perhaps not. But more and more are understanding the need for settlement houses such as yours. I always said you would have a remarkable future, Olympia.”
“And I hope that future shall include me,” says Haskell, crossing the small room to greet Philbrick.
“John,” says Philbrick, standing once again. “I have heard nothing but good things about your clinic.”
“Thank you, Philbrick. Please sit. It has been a rewarding venture. And we have been fortunate in our funding.”
“So I understand. It is always difficult to maintain a private hospital. But your endowment is substantial now?”
“Yes, it is, and I am able to hire two new physicians this year. Indeed, I am afraid I must leave you now to go to interview a young man from New York about one of the positions. I shall be back for dinner, though, and I hope you will stay and dine with us?”
“Thank you,” Philbrick says. “I should like that very much.”
Haskell bends toward Olympia and kisses her. “Unfortunately, Rufus, with this household and my clinic, Olympia and I must often make appointments simply to see each other,” Haskell says.
Philbrick considers the couple. “It does not appear to have bruised the marriage any,” he says amiably.
“Nothing shall ever do
that,” says Haskell. Olympia glances quickly up at her husband, who smiles genially at Philbrick, and perhaps only she can see the thing that has gone out of him and can never be replaced, no matter how much pride he has in his work, no matter how much love he has for his wife. For he has had to forfeit his children — once, as a result of having chosen love; twice, as he watched Olympia walk away from the boy; and now, a third time, in marrying a woman who most likely will not have another. Olympia thinks often about desire — desire that stops the breath, that causes a preoccupied pause in the midst of uttering a sentence — and how it may upend a life and threaten to dissolve the soul.
• • •
“Tell me, how are your father and mother?” Philbrick asks when Haskell has gone.
“My father visits often,” Olympia says. “Indeed, it is he who supports us. My mother is well and will come for the summer.”
“I hope I shall see them.”
“Then you shall. They are taking a cottage farther down the beach.”
“Olympia, I have come on a serious matter.”
The abrupt change in Philbrick’s tone takes Olympia by surprise. “Yes?” she asks.
“Albertine Bolduc has passed away.”
The handle of Olympia’s teacup slips from her fingers, and the cup rattles into its saucer. She sets it down on the marble table for fear of dropping it altogether.
“She died six months ago,” Philbrick says. “From the white lung. One might have anticipated it.”
Olympia looks away. She seldom allows herself to think of the boy, to imagine him. She has, over the years, tried to put such thoughts away. She has tried not to think: He is nine now. And now he is ten.
“Telesphore Bolduc has been caring for the boy,” Philbrick says, “but he is ill himself. Tuberculosis. The boy is eleven.”
Olympia says nothing.
“A tender age, as you know,” Philbrick says, eyeing her carefully. “It was Telesphore who asked me to come to you.”
“Was it?” she asks, scarcely believing what she is hearing.
“As you know, you are, by decree of the court, still his legal guardian.”
“I surrendered that responsibility,” she says.
“Yes, I know. And it was an extraordinary thing you did.”
“I have sent money from time to time,” she says, “but I have felt it necessary to keep myself at a remove.”
“Of course,” Philbrick says. “But it is not only money that the boy is needing right now.”
“Then I do not understand.”
“I know that this is neither here nor there in terms of your responsibility to the child, considering past events, but it would be necessary for you to approve any decision to place the boy back with the orphanage.”
“He must go to the orphanage?” she asks.
“I am afraid so. He is still a minor. And I would guess that he would not have much success at being placed out from there, since parents looking for children are rarely if ever interested in eleven-year-old boys.”
“What about the rest of the family?”
“Most are gone now. The family has been hard hit by the closing of the mills. Many have already had to move farther south.”
“Yes, I see.”
“I have taken an interest in the boy from the very beginning,” Philbrick says. “Well, I felt bound to, didn’t I? I visit him from time to time. I would take him in myself, but it is not me whom the boy needs. He is still sad. But you will find that he is quick. He has an untutored intelligence.”
“I will find . . . ?”
“He is here,” Philbrick says quickly.
“He is here? In this house?”
“I have brought him with me. The boy does not know anything about you,” he adds. “I have merely told him I needed to pay a visit to a friend. Forgive me for this intrusion upon your privacy, Olympia, but I did think it best. I felt it important for you at least to set eyes upon the boy before you decide his future.”
“Mr. Philbrick, you have given me a shock.”
“No greater than you can bear, or have I gravely misjudged the woman?”
“Where is he?” she asks.
“On your porch. I rather think he has taken a fancy to your telescope.”
• • •
With an unsteady gait, she walks from the study to the front room, overstuffed now with furniture to accommodate all of the girls and their infants when the entire household gathers in the parlor after the evening meal. Through the windows, she can see the boy on the porch. He is tall, his hair badly cut. He has on a sweater that perhaps once was ivory. She watches as he circles the telescope, bending to peer through it, moving it back and forth, seemingly searching the sea for something important.
She takes a shawl from the back of a chair and walks out onto the porch.
“Hello,” she says.
“Oh, hello,” the boy says, looking up from the telescope. He takes a step forward and holds out his hand.
Polite, she thinks. Well mannered. His fingers are cold from having been so long outside.
“You must be freezing,” she says.
“Oh no,” he says quickly, snatching his hand away, clearly not wanting to be told to go back into the house. “You live here?”
“Yes,” she says. “I am Olympia Haskell.”
He is spindly, at an age when the bones grow too fast for the rest of the body. And spindly, he does not resemble Haskell as much as he used to. Though the hazel eyes are the same. Strikingly the same.
“You are the woman Mr. Philbrick has come to visit,” the boy says. Awkwardly, and perhaps cold after all, he stuffs his hands into the pockets of his trousers.
“Yes.”
“Is this yours?” he asks, gesturing with his elbow to the telescope.
“Yes, it is.”
His English, though accented, is not poor. He has had some schooling somewhere, she thinks.
“Do you go to school?” she asks.
“I used to,” he says.
Olympia nods.
“Mr. Philbrick is taking me to Boston with him in June,” the boy says. “We shall see the science museum and the Public Garden.”
“I used to live at the edge of the Public Garden,” she says.
“Did you?” he asks with keen interest. “Is it true that in the spring the children have races with miniature boats in the pond?”
“Yes. If you are there on the right day.”
“Last year we went into Portsmouth.”
“And what did you think of that city?”
“I liked the place where they build the ships.”
“The shipyard.”
“Yes. Can you see France?” he asks, gesturing again toward the telescope.
“No.”
“Can you see the stars?”
“Yes.”
“How is it that one can see the stars, which are so far away, and cannot see France, which is closer?”
“That is an interesting question,” she says. “I think it has something to do with the curvature of the Earth. And also the stars are brighter.”
“Could we see Ely Falls if we pointed the telescope in the right direction?” he asks.
“I am not sure. Perhaps if we got onto the roof, we would be able to see the steeple of Saint Andre’s.”
“I should like to do that,” he says.
“Then you shall come back to visit and we will do that.”
“Well, surely you would not go onto the roof,” he says, seemingly alarmed at the thought of a grown woman on a rooftop.
“No, probably not. But my husband would.”
“Is your husband here now?”
“No, he will be back this evening.”
“Oh,” says the boy with evident disappointment.
“Well, you shall definitely come back to visit in the daytime when he is here,” Olympia says.
“I have been to this beach,” he says.
“Have you? When was this?”
; “I came for the Fourth of July.”
“And did you have fun?”
“Oh, yes. My mother made a picnic, and she went into the water with me.”
The boy’s face tightens suddenly.
“There is a man in that fishing boat out there,” Olympia says quickly, pointing out to sea.
The boy stoops to the telescope. “I can see him,” he says. “He must be a lobster fisherman. Here. Would you like to see?”
The boy takes a step backward to make room for Olympia. She, too, bends to look. In his excitement, the boy stands so close to her that she can feel his elbow and his upper arm.
She can see the lawn, too close, the chapel that will shortly be made over into a dormitory. The rocky ledge. The sea. She turns the knobs, focusing. There is the fishing boat, a man in oilskins pulling in a pot. In the distance, hardly visible, she sees another boat and behind that the Isles of Shoals, merely a hazy suggestion. Beyond the islands, there is France. And then there are the stars. And farther still, there are the lost years and a history written upon the bones.
But here there is a boy, and his name is Pierre.
Acknowledgments
The court opinions cited in italics in this work of fiction are, in fact, true ones, and portions of the final judgment are taken from the court transcript of the Pennsylvania case of d’Hauteville v. Sears, Sears and d’Hauteville. I am grateful to John Martland for reading and editing the trial section of my novel and to the following works for providing me with information regarding child custody law in the late nineteenth century: A Judgment for Solomon by Michael Grossberg; From Father’s Property to Children’s Rights by Mary Ann Mason; and Governing the Hearth by Michael Grossberg.
I also found inspiration or bits of history in these works: Gleanings from the Sea by Joseph W. Smith; The Cities on the Saco by Jacques Downs; La Foi, La Langue, La Culture by Dr. Michael Guignard; Biddeford in Old Photographs, compiled by Loretta M. Turner; The Images of America series for Saco, Hampton, and Rye; From Humors to Medical Science by John Duffy; The Library of Health, edited by Frank Scholl; America 1900, The Turning Point by Judy Crichton; A World Within a World: Manchester, the Mills and the Immigrant Experience by Gary Samson; Working People of Holyoke by William Hartford; Women at Home in Victorian America by Ellen Plante; and A Memory Book: Mt. Holyoke College 1837–1987 by Anne Carey Edmonds.
